How Oscar-winning cinematographer CONRAD L. HALL made American so beautiful--and shot an ending you'll never see. Plus, a look at his brilliant career.
It's gotten the best reviews of any movie so far this year. Amazingly, when it was on fewer than 500 screens, the dark suburban comedy came in among the top five box office moneymakers. But when Conrad L. Hall, the 73-year-old eight-time Oscar nominee who served as American Beauty's director of photography, sat down to watch the finished film with British director Sam Mendes, 34, he felt he was witnessing an artistic homicide.
"It was like somebody had taken a sword and drawn it through my gut," says Hall, forcefully miming a hara-kiri gesture. "I felt like, what the hell happened?"
A radical postproduction rejigger, that's what. In a bold move that has certainly paid off, Mendes unflinchingly sliced out a number of scenes that had been shot. Out went the original opening, which showed Kevin Spacey as a dead Lester Burnham flying down from heaven in a bathrobe to revisit his old suburban hood. More radically, out went the entire last five minutes of the plot, in which the Burnhams' neighbor Ricky (Wes Bentley; see page 41) was shown being framed and jailed for Lester's murder. Not only did the chopping radically alter the ending of the film (which we won't give away here), it also left some of Hall's most ravishing work in the trash bin.
Was Hall freaked? Absolutely, but Mendes won him over by running the movie for him two more times in quick succession. "The final time, I showed it to Conrad on film instead of video, and he started to get excited," says Mendes, making his movie-directing debut after success on Broadway with the revival of Cabaret and last season's The Blue Room. "He started giving me ideas about 'what if we printed this or that a little darker,' and that's what I wanted. The process of perfecting prints is gobbledygook to me. Conrad is magnificently skilled at it."
Few in Hollywood would argue, since Hall ranks among the most renowned directors of photography. With credits ranging from Cool Hand Luke to last year's A Civil Action, Hall's been helping movie directors realize their visions for four decades, finding myriad ways to sculpt with light and dark. He wound up collaborating with Mendes thanks to Tom Cruise, who read Alan Ball's Beauty script while Mendes was working with Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. Based on the work Hall had done on Without Limits (a 1998 film Cruise produced), the actor advised Mendes, "Get Connie." On the following pages, we deconstruct Hall and Mendes' extraordinary approach to American Beauty--and look back on Hall's long-thriving career.
Filmography
Born in Tahiti, Conrad L. Hall (right)--son of Mutiny on the Bounty coauthor James Norman Hall--studied movies at USC. He shot TV shows (the original Outer Limits) and ads, then graduated to features. Here he aims his viewfinder at career highs and lows.
1966 INCUBUS
Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens tapped Hall for this demonic-love-conquers-all story, written and acted entirely in Esperanto and starring a young William Shatner. "The negative and prints got destroyed after it came out. Then two years ago, they found a French-subtitled print in an archive, so they had to put the English titles over those. It's a metaphysical witchcraft picture. Lots of mist and people with horns. We shot in Big Sur in black and white, very Ingmar Bergman. Why Esperanto, I don't know."
1967 COOL HAND LUKE
Hall's second film with Paul Newman, after 1966's Harper, reinvented the chain-gang flick for the Vietnam generation. Audiences buzzed about the egg-eating scene, where Luke downs 50 hard-boileds. "Paul would pop the eggs in and chew and chew and, Cut! Spit them out, needless to say. We did all kinds of high jinks to bring a visual interest. Lots of quick cuts. We had the camera sort of rocking back and forth like a swing when Luke is doing knee bends. Otherwise it'd just be a bunch of people walking and talking."
1967 IN COLD BLOOD(*)
Despite stark lighting just this side of German expressionism, Hall gave a documentary feel to the story of two real-life killers played by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson. "The studio wanted it shot in color, but [director] Richard Brooks saw it as black and white. And then that was the first year the Academy Awards didn't have a separate category for black-and-white cinematography, so we were up against color work." (The Oscar went to Burnett Guffey for the shockingly red-blooded Bonnie and Clyde.)
1969 BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID(*)
Hall got his Oscar for the hazy, desaturated, mythic look he brought to screenwriter William Goldman's revisionist Western, which starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Hall and third-billed Katharine Ross were lovers, and when he let her operate a camera one day on a multi-camera setup, director George Roy Hill kicked her off the set, letting her back only for her scenes. "Anything we could shoot through smoke or steam or branches, we did. I made the posse [pursuing Butch and Sundance] a sort of metaphorical presence by using extremely long zoom lenses and always shooting them from a distance. Sometimes five miles away, so even when you zoomed in, you barely saw them. They were a faceless technology that put bandits out of business."
1975 THE DAY OF THE LOCUST(*)
With director John Schlesinger, Hall gave an epic sweep to Waldo Salt's adaptation of Nathanael West's story about the underbelly of 1930s Hollywood. "A really good film and not a popular one. That scene with Donald Sutherland pouncing on the [child]--oh, my God, I hated watching that scene. But it was to show people are capable of the most horrid violence when frustration builds to the boiling point."
1976 MARATHON MAN
Again partnered with Schlesinger, Hall mapped out one of the all-time horrifying, white-knuckle movie scenes: Laurence Olivier's sadistic ex-Nazi drilling Dustin Hoffman's teeth sans anesthesia. "We didn't invent that scene, you know. It was written [by William Goldman], and then beautifully executed by the actors. I kept it very stark, sort of one light over Dustin Hoffman, one behind him, creating a kind of adversarial look to Laurence. Like an interrogation chamber."
1988 TEQUILA SUNRISE(*)
Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell played old pals on opposite sides of the law, with Michelle Pfeiffer caught between them in impossibly gorgeous settings. "It was a subject [writer-director] Robert Towne wanted romanticized--what happens to friends who've drifted. You don't have to do much to make these actors look good. Michelle Pfeiffer is just the most beautiful woman. Big, wide, separate eyes that are so full of meaning."
1993 SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER(*)
Screenwriter Steven Zaillian made his writing-directing debut with this tale of a chess prodigy. "I added tension by leaving the players' eyes so close to the top of the frame, it gave you a sense of unease that they might move out of the image any second. What else was there to look at? A bunch of out-of-focus chess pieces is not interesting. I came to the idea that chess could be like basketball--a rhythm of fast break, then slam dunk."
1994 LOVE AFFAIR
A misbegotten remake of the Charles Boyer- Irene Dunne tearjerker with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, directed by Glenn Gordon Caron. "I wanted out of it after Robert Towne [who cowrote it] left. But Warren is one of the most persuasive persons I've ever known. He took me to a Mexican restaurant and plied me with guacamole and margaritas. I felt seduced. I figured, hey, Warren directed Reds, how bad could this be? I do love him, and we're friends now, but we had fights like you couldn't imagine. I've never gone so ballistic on a picture in my life. Warren would drag me through relighting him over and over again. But Kate Hepburn sent me a wonderful little note complimenting me on how she looked."
1998 A CIVIL ACTION(*)
Hall's second team-up with Zaillian starred John Travolta as a crusading lawyer and Robert Duvall as his corporate adversary. "We shot this big, wonderful finale with Travolta serving Duvall papers for a new lawsuit out at a ballpark, which of course got cut from the movie. We'd had to blow-dry snow off the field to see grass. When Duvall came out, there was general, respectful applause. When John walked on, it was like bobby-soxers at a Sinatra concert. People were screaming, flashbulbs flashing. Just a wild melee, out of control. That is a big, big movie star."
WEST RENTLEY
"BUT DAD, IT'S OPRAH Winfrey.
I have to rape Oprah Winfrey."
It was summer 1997, and a freaked-out Wes Bentley was on the phone from Pennsylvania to his Methodist-minister parents back in Little Rock, Ark. The good news? At 19, Bentley had won a small role in Beloved--a big step up to a top studio (Disney) and an Oscar-winning director (Jonathan Demme) after appearing in a barely released 1998 European indie flick called Three Below Zero. The bad news? He'd said yes without a script. Now he found he'd be playing a plantation bully who forcibly suckles milk from a slave. (One small mercy Bentley didn't yet realize: It turned out the scene would be a flashback, so instead of star Winfrey, it would be "younger Sethe," Lisa Gay Hamilton, whose prosthetic stunt breasts he'd have to manhandle.)
"I told my dad, this kid treats people like animals," Bentley recalls with a wince. "Do I want to do this? He said, `Stop worrying, you're not going to get typecast this early. Besides, isn't this what you love to do? To delve into extreme things?'" Bentley cracks a sidelong grin. "It made me smile. I was like, damn, my dad just got me. I just got spanked without the hand."
The slap got him through the brutality required (which few moviegoers saw, since Beloved was bedeviled at the box office, though Bentley cringes when recounting how friends "left messages like, `Saw you with the boob. Urn, call me, you raping son of a bitch'"). Two years later, you won't find a more self-disciplined young actor than Wes Bentley. He's the picture of confidence as the preternaturally calm, videocam-wielding, dope-dealing teen aesthete Ricky Fitts in American Beauty--and producing studio DreamWorks has shrewdly turned the 21-year-old into one of the picture's main selling points. In good part, they've done so by promoting Beauty in twin guises. Nighttime-TV dramas got promos touting top-billed stars Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening. Meanwhile, youth-oriented shows ran ads spotlighting Bentley, along with his young costars Thora Birch and Mena Suvari.
"This movie is clicking with young people because the teen roles are portrayed with such maturity and honesty," says Spacey. "It's not about trying to get laid. It's a serious expression of the rootlessness a lot of kids feel. And that hinges a lot on how deep Wes' performance goes."
Bentley had the role sewn up the moment he appeared on the last day of director Sam Mendes' auditions. "Wes didn't even have a professional photo," recalls Mendes, who'd already met with about 30 actors ages 16 to 25 (he's mum on who). "He just had a Polaroid. But I was struck by his intensity and his delicacy. And his eyes." Mendes immediately rang Spacey, who was likewise impressed--and intrigued to discover Bentley was a fellow Juilliard School dropout (Spacey lasted three years, Bentley one). "Smart boy," says Spacey. "Nothing against training or Juilliard, but clearly he was ready to start his journey."
That journey will likely accelerate after American Beauty. He's already played a lead role as a serial killer in The White River Kid opposite Antonio Banderas and Bob Hoskins, but apparent discord over the picture has delayed its release (Bentley made the flick just before Beauty). Next up is Soul Survivors, a Sixth Senseian drama about a college student traumatized by a fatal car accident. Beyond that, Bentley's not yet committed to any projects. He does know he doesn't want to make, say, Son of Godzilla. "I want to be in stuff with characters," he says. "You can spend a ton on visual style, and it doesn't do a thing for people. I live to play these extreme feelings." Dad, get ready for another phone call.
(*) Academy Award nominee for Best Cinematography
PETAL-PHILIA
In fantasy segments storyboarded by director Mendes, Spacey's character sees his daughter's high school-cheerleader pal (Mena Suvari) in come-hither, rose-petal-drenched poses. Mendes wanted Suvari floating on the ceiling in a "lake of roses" for one shot. Hall attempted a suspended-water effect, but says, "You'd have to build a tank system to get it right." They modified that image to a petal cascade, and Mendes got his H2O in this tub shot.
FEIGN DINING
Hall intended the family table, set by Annette Bening's Martha Stewart-gone-haywire character (left), to "look so fastidious and elegant it would put over her personality, the way she obsesses about appearances."He hid tiny extra lights behind the flowervases near Thora Birch (center), who plays the daughter of Bening and Spacey (right),to give her "a purity" and an "ironic senseof a perfect family, which of course they're not."
HE DOES WINDOWS The dark framing panes and silhouetted bottles in this point-of-view shot--we're looking at Spacey and Birch the way a Peeping Tom neighbor sees them--exemplify Hall's push-the-envelope, low-watt approach. "He lights as dark as he can, and then prints the image 'up' to compensate," says Mendes. Explains Hall: "That gives you more texture. But it also makes the actors a lot more comfortable. The lower the light, the coolerthe set. I heard Stanley Kubrick did that on Eyes Wide Shut."
THIS OLD HOUSE Does the Burnhams' suburban neighborhood look familiar? It should. Their home was created by modifying an existing facade on a studio backlot street--the same street that's appeared in lots of old TV sitcoms. "We had to do it on a lot because Sam wanted to be able to shoot from all these specific angles looking between two neighboring houses, and you couldn't do that on a real street with a bunch of residents hanging around." The downside: rats. Attests Hall, "These facades are just infested."